Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemYoung children's transmediated semiosis with artworks in residence( 2022)This study investigated how six four-year-old children made meaning when engaged with adult- created paintings and sculptures (static, moving and sound-producing) created by nine professional artists. These prime-source artworks were chosen for their potential to resonate with the children’s predilections, as determined by their teachers and parents. The artworks were installed in five ‘residencies’ in the children’s classroom for a duration of one week each, across two preschool terms. The artists, located in the Perth regions of Western Australia, shared a context reflected in the artwork’s themes and artistic qualities, and which resonated with the children’s social-cultural experiences. Studies in art galleries/museums have shown the effectiveness of hands-on approaches to learning in which children were actively involved in thinking for themselves and constructing their own ideas (Piscitelli & Penfold, 2015). Hence, children were immersed in unique aesthetic experiences through ongoing, repeated viewings, and interpretations of the artworks. Qualitative case study methodology (Stake, 2010; Yin, 2018) was used to document children’s semiosis – how multimodal meaning was made across sign systems. Children generated and expanded meaning cyclically through multimodal representations and communications (Kress, 2010). Meaning-making was socially mediated and transmediated between children’s oral, visual and embodied modes while engaged with the artworks (Suhor, 1984). This study provided an opportunity for a unique collaboration between the teachers, parents (at home) and the researcher, where observations of the children’s activities provided different perspectives that were regularly discussed, probed, verified and documented. Children’s play- based activities in response to the artworks was captured through digital video recordings and researcher field notes, and children’s drawings, paintings and 3-D creations were photographed. Video and photography were transcribed, and data were reduced through indexing, summarising, and coded using QSR NVivo 12, from which themes emerged. The findings revealed the children’s repertoire of sign-making proclivities and encounters were multisensory activities of noticing and forming individual connections with the artworks. Opportunities to view the artworks repeatedly involved perezhivaniya–experiencing of an imagined, but nevertheless emotive struggle for meaning (Vygotsky, 1925/1971). Perezhivaniya were resolved through socially mediated activities such as the zone of proximal development - where the more expert children/adults supplemented and scaffolded other children, and where all individuals were involved in transmediation activities, often through play. The study highlighted the significance of focusing on children’s semiosis, transmediation and social mediation activities in learning and development.
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ItemDrama as a Pedagogic Tool for Developing Academic Language Proficiency in the Middle Primary School( 2022)This thesis explores the use of drama as a powerful pedagogic tool for developing primary students’ academic language proficiency in Years Three and Four. By middle primary school, students require a growing bank of academic language to support their interpretation and creation of increasingly complex, discipline-specific texts. In addition, their teachers need a toolkit of evidence-based strategies to support students’ academic language development. Drama is one such tool. Through creating authentic fictional contexts, drama enables students to try out experiences, personas, and registers beyond those that are characteristic of a classroom. Currently, drama as a targeted language development tool is underused by primary teachers. Classroom-based research is needed to examine how drama-rich literacy interventions can develop student academic language and the conditions under which the use of drama-rich pedagogy in this space is most effective. This study examines how embodied, role-based and social/interactive drama experiences can provide supportive contexts for academic language development and recommends the planning and teaching considerations that make them most effective. A collective interventionist case study was undertaken in three Melbourne primary schools to examine how Year Three and Four teachers can use drama-rich pedagogy to support students’ academic language development. The researcher worked with three participant teachers to design three drama-rich literacy interventions. Key findings from the study show that embodied drama experiences can create a contextualised, concrete bridge between students’ initial encounters with abstract academic language and their eventual take-up and ownership of it. The role-based drama experiences created an authentic context for a shift towards an academic register in conversations between teacher and student on the topics being studied, prompting students to speak as experts and teachers to speak to experts, necessitating academic language use. These embodied and role-based drama experiences interacted effectively to provide substantive, concrete experiences on which students could reflect through an expert lens. Findings show that social/interactive drama experiences created space for dialogue and cognitive apprenticeship and, especially when employed in conjunction with role-based conventions and techniques, facilitated a functional approach to language use as students were motivated to mobilise academic language to communicate clearly and precisely. Other key findings contributing to knowledge in the field provide pedagogic recommendations to maximise the effectiveness of the supportive contexts for academic language development created by these drama experiences. These recommendations cover the use of academic language-rich pretexts as catalysts for the drama, supporting student and teacher confidence and competence with drama conventions and the need for explicit teaching of target academic language in the context of the drama conventions.